The man called Terry raised into a sitting position. He sat feeling his face. By God, where’d I put my pistol? I’m going to kill that son of a bitch!
Yes, said the taller older man mockingly, you kill him, we’re like to be hung. Come on, Terry, get the rocks out of your ass. Let’s move along.
He took Terry’s hand and pulled the man to his feet. Terry staggered back against the rifled bureau.
Mr. Secesh, the taller fellow addressed Ira, you got any money?
I have a little money.
Then we’ll just take that.
Ira reached for his pocket.
No, no! Right pants pocket? I’ll just take that myself. Keep your gun on his head, Lester, he directed the man in the door. For Christ sake don’t shoot me if you got to pull trigger. Swiftly his hairy hands slapped around Ira’s breast and flanks, feeling for a pistol, but he did not touch the inside of the thigh. One hand struck the razor case in Ira’s coat pocket. The razor was produced, the man put it in his own pocket. That’ll be for Terry, he said. He needs a good shave—don’t you, Terry boy? He found the fold of Ira’s bills, counted swiftly, pocketed the money. By all appearances he was the commander; yet his blue coat, torn at one shoulder, bore no insignia of rank. Lester, he ordered the squat fellow with the carbine, go take a look-see. And you, Mister Secesh—he motioned with his own weapon. Go over and set down on that sofy. There was a couch behind. Ira backed off, sat down in obedience. From outside sounded the inarticulate yap of Lester. Then he came stumbling to the door. Critter soldiers, he said breathlessly. Despite his blue jacket he must not be a Yankee born and bred: not if he said critter soldiers.
Whereabouts?—
Two three fields yonder—
They galloping?—
Sort of poking along. We got time to get—
Then let’s get! Stay where you be, Mister!—
The rough-bearded Terry had already moved speedily if uncertainly into the passage, and Ira could hear him, with Lester, crossing the gallery, descending the steps. There was a wrenching of rotten wood, the sound of someone falling, a spout of curses and simultaneous laughter from the man who had not fallen. You keep setting, the tall man directed Ira Claffey. He pointed his carbine once more in Ira’s general direction. Glad you had some currency on you, even Secesh. Our luck’s been skinny all the day. I swear that these folks haven’t got nothing to bite or break. Then he was gone; you could hear pull of leather as the men mounted . . . quickly the diminishing sound of galloping. Ira stood at the cobwebby eastern window and watched the party moving with speed along the clay road, disappearing behind a bank of chinaberries which might or might not shield another house. He turned to the old lady who had not left her chair, who still sat shuddering. It’s all right, Madam. He doubted if she heard or understood him. There was a scratching in the passageway. He stepped to the door and found two Negro girls, aged perhaps nine and eleven, who shrank away from him and then went scurrying toward the rear. They wore crude gowns made of sacking, they looked like miniature witches in panic, they began yelping in the rear yard. Ira recognized a jangle of buckles or weapons, a muddle of hoofs outside. He stepped to the gallery, and counted: six cavalrymen in the mixed blue-gray so common nowadays among Confederates, yet gray predominated. These were no bushwhackers—not in the way they sat their horses, not in the way they were poised. They filed through a gate from the western field. Only one man drew a revolver, though all were gazing curiously at the stranger who made his way down the ruined steps and walked to meet them.
Your house? asked a soldier.
No. I was on the road. The Yankees stopped our train.
We saw it, said another. We was watching from the woods. Reckon you hain’t no Yankee?
I come from Sumter County. Ira told briefly of the occurrence at this farmhouse. All six cavalrymen rested quietly, gazing down without comment, unimpressed. Just bummers, they said. Same old story, happens all the while. Did you say that the old lady was hurted?
I doubt they laid a hand on her. But she seems hysterical, shocked and frightened half to death.
Which way did you say them bummers went?
Due ahead, east. They were galloping: I fear you’d have a hard time catching up. What is your organization, gentlemen?
We’re with Joe Wheeler, said one with tarnished stripes of a sergeant. Then, to another— What you say, Lilly? Less pick ourselves a bummer or two for supper. They rode away.
Ira Claffey reclaimed his carpetbag. He found that he was covered with sweat in spite of chill raw air which blew with increasing sharpness. The hazy sun was hiding behind western pines. Ira heard someone at the house, he turned to see. An extremely tall Negress stood above the steps, facing him belligerently. Her skirts were pinned up raggedly above spindly shanks, she had a faded red cloth tied around her head, two of the corners stood up from the knot like erect ears of some animal. Her hands were on her hips, though one hand gripped a wooden potato masher.
You go long, she ordered Ira distinctly. Done you bother round here, bother Miss Gracie no more!
Ira grinned. He went along the road to the east, following the little band of Wheeler’s cavalry who were trotting, then loping, who soon disappeared over the ridge. There stood a new column of black smoke in the north; Ira fancied that he could see flames at the base of it; a large structure must be burning beyond those empty fields. He turned to look back at the ramshackle farmhouse. The angular black woman had come down from the porch and stood in the road, a stiff threat against the fading sunlight. She turned and went back to the gallery.
Ira marveled, as he had marveled earlier, at the peculiar casual quality of war. He had a baffled curiosity concerning smaller events which accompanied warfare, offshoots of the cruel parent plant. He wondered how men might ever conceive tapestries and paintings which they created, presumably to portray battles. He had never traveled abroad, had seen but a few great paintings; yet those he had seen—or engravings in books—never suggested the fact of war. Ira remembered the first man he ever saw struck by a bullet. A column of troops, cooking inside thick blue uniforms, wearing jackets and shirts open at the neck (some mutineers against authority, some bold seekers after comfort, had actually taken their jackets off and flung them away)— The column straggled into the pitted street of a Mexican village, stumbling over red-dusted stones. He remembered a white church on an eminence beyond; he remembered women in black costumes who ran toward that church, some carrying babies, herding children ahead of them. He remembered that some of the children were naked, they looked like sprites. Then a party of guerrillas, or citizens acting as guerrillas, fired from roof-tops ahead. There was a patter of balls pocking into various individuals of the troops or scraping on hard-baked earth and stones, squealing in ricochet. A young man directly ahead of Ira was struck. He was blowing his nose at the moment of impact, blowing his nose into a dirty handkerchief turned brown by grime of the march. The man made a sound like gah, he swung out his right hand holding the handkerchief, brought it back again. Adjacent people scattered; orders were being shouted, officers were trying to deploy men off that fatal road, to have them take shelter behind rocks. The man with the handkerchief (Ira couldn’t remember his name for a certainty; he thought that it was Bradley) had gone down on one knee in a kneeling posture. His musket, which he had been carrying slung, fell from his shoulder and lay with its barrel across the foot bent behind him. Then he finished blowing his nose. Ira and two others had halted to give him aid. The soldier wiped his nose carefully, and all the time he accomplished this rite, a wet place was spreading down from the hole in his coat. A button turned red, then drops fell from the button and a polished fly buzzed close. The man fell forward and a little to one side. When they turned him over it was amazing to see that he had a mystic grin on his face, as if he were delighted at the whole occurrence.
Oh, Ira cried, it is casual, casual. War and death in war are unst
udied, never built in rigid pattern as once I believed that they would be.
So it went forever: a colonel directing troops in battle, his jaw swollen with toothache; the straggler shot behind a fence whilst in the act of evacuation; a bottle lying on the battlefield, a bottle with no label, containing some dark liquid, the neck trimmed off neatly by a bullet . . . still the bulk of the bottle was unshattered. The casualness of war . . . thing without duplication; no several shots ever sounded quite alike, hills gave back different echoes. The song of war was never sung twice in the same way.
As Ira Claffey went on helplessly and hopelessly, with twilight following him and then overtaking him, he perceived the same disordered uncertain quality which had been in his thought. He thought that fog rose to the north and east. It was strange to have fog and smoke mingled, resembling a wall of bad weather rising to threaten. Then he began to smell the fog: it was not fog, it was thick dust. There had been no rain in these parts, fields and roads were unseasonably parched.
What might so disturb the dust?
Vast numbers of wheels and hoofs.
It seemed that he heard them: wide-flung rumble and pushing and treading beyond the ridges.
On an instant he felt earth trembling under his feet, responding to a drumming from behind. He turned and stepped across a ditch for safety’s sake. Out of dimness and dust a throng of blue cavalrymen bore down upon him. No Confederates, these: solidly in blue, and a veteran aspect to them, even at first glimpse. There galloped fifty or sixty men in the group. What was the strength of a troop or a squadron?—Ira could not recollect. They poured past, only a few streaked faces turned to regard him. What was a man, a citizen standing beside a fence with a carpetbag in his hand? They had seen many such figures. Then darkening dust was so thick that Ira could not see where the riders had gone. He wondered if they would overtake the half-dozen of Wheeler’s men, he wondered if they were seeking them.
He went on aimlessly, grieved by growing awareness that invaders were all around him, ahead of him. He would never reach Savannah, never reach Richmond. Dear Lord, I started too late. I should have gone earlier; but had not dreamt that I could do a particle of good until desperation drove me to believe it. Murky landscape was turned pinkish. As Ira walked he began to identify individual stronger glows which gave forth a solid color: large fires, two to the left, one directly ahead and seeming low and wide as if a valley were lit, another fire ahead and slightly to the right.
Night tightened. Ira passed a stand of forest, mostly oaks—he could see the points of leaves clinging to the starkness, revealed easily against illumination beyond. He passed the last of the trees and stood where the road dipped. Yes, it was a valley. A house was burning, there seemed to be other embers beyond. A figure moved beside the crackling house, some other figures were motionless. Flames burst and stung; it sounded like a vast popping of corn; fleet somersaulting embers made unholy pyrotechnics above the blast. As Ira came near he heard the sound of crying as if dogs howled there. Closer he came limping to the yard fence. There was too much heat, he could not approach the actual blaze nor could the victims whose home was spouting aloft. A woman and a girl—mother and daughter—stood clutched in each other’s arms. Tears seemed fairly boiling on their faces, yet they did not dare turn from this ascending horror; they stood hypnotized as they wept. The woman was comely; but her hair was coming down, her wet round cheeks were varnished in reflection; she was young, perhaps not much above thirty. The daughter was old enough to have her skirts long, but she had not put up her brownish hair: it was a mane around her shoulders, and one small ribbon was gilded by glow. The hair became a lovely thing in that light.
A man spoke beside Ira. By God, I never burned that bridge. I never. And look what they done to me!
A few things had been dragged out, but only a few: a barrel had been rolled, a clock stood on the barrel; there were two chairs, a kettle with tongs sticking out, a pile of bedclothing, a bonnet, a lantern: Ira saw these things. Now a black-and-white cat rushed frantically across the hot open ground, leaped up on the fence beside the two men, gave them a look of fury, spilled herself down into darkness of the road.
Leastways, said the farmer, we got the kittens out. We forgot them; then my girl went back and fetched the basket, and blame near got herself burned up a-doing it. Strangely he gave a weak giggle. First off I thought you was neighbor Barfield from beyond the ridge; now I see you ain’t. You ain’t one of them bummers? and suddenly he loomed at Ira and lifted his hands as if ready to throttle.
I’m from Sumter County. Claffey’s my name.
Name is Keeling, said the bushy-bearded man—a tall fellow, extremely spare of body. Somehow Ira thought of an Andersonville prisoner, and wondered what the resemblance might be. I’m Jim Keeling, said the man again. Always played fair with the Yanks, and reckoned maybe they’d play fair with me if they headed this way. But it didn’t come out like that, as you can see. He turned and yelled, Minnie, you and the girl get away from that, now. Sparks liable to set your gowns afire!
Neither the woman nor the girl answered or moved. They were rooted and clutching, still crying.
You got a chaw on you? asked Keeling. No? Well, the surgeons done told me I shouldn’t chew tobacco neither, count of my digestion. But it’s something to do. . . . He told his story to Ira as flames kept howling. He had been drafted more than two years previously. His wife and the girl and an old grandfather tried to work the farm while he was gone, but now the grandfather was dead. Good thing he didn’t live to see this! He’d of had a fit and fell in it. For he built this very house, mostly with his own hands. Well.
Jim Keeling served finally with the Forty-ninth Georgia and had been wounded in Virginia the previous summer. . . . Twas a spent ball, but it nigh knocked the breath out of me. Ever since twas healed, I’ve had great difficulty keeping my food down. That’s how come I lost so many pounds: don’t weigh two-thirds my natural self now.
Shortly before sunset the bridge beside that house had been set afire. None of the Keelings saw who started the blaze, they saw no one running from the scene. It was just that suddenly they heard and smelled and saw the fire, and ran into their yard to watch the bridge burning. . . . This ain’t exactly a turnpike through here, Mister; but it’s a good road and I spose valued by the Yanks accordingly. After that bridge fell through, just a while ago, a whole kit and boiling of Yankee cavalry come into this here very yard.
I think I saw them, said Ira. They passed me, beyond that hill. At least fifty of them.
Could have been—they looked like five hundred to me. They said I’d burned that bridge to hold up the Yank advance, and I told them, by God I never. Well, they said I ought to have kept from doing it whoever he was who done it. They said I was big enough; and then they found my gun and they says, See, you could have kept anybody from burning that bridge. So they broke my gun, smashed it gainst the fireplace. I couldn’t do nothing to repel them; they was far too many for me. Anyway I’m sickly, as I tolt you. Well. The officer, he said twas retaliation: that was the word he used. Said he’d been ordered to perform such duty, and by that time some of his men had took my sow, and blooded her, and had her up on a horse, like the horse was carrying double. Don’t reckon they took much else. But it don’t matter now—everything’s burning, cept the little bit we got out. They just marched us from the house and cut some sticks of pine from my wood pile and went to torching right and left. When they had her well alight, they rode off. Then we run to get what we could; but, as you see, twasn’t much.
It seemed odd to Ira that the Federals had left the low stable and other outbuildings untouched; perhaps they were pressed for time. Thus far a light but steady north wind had turned the drift of flames and embers away from the sheds; but now, as the roof of the house went in with a bright crash, a shift occurred. Blazing little birds traveled to the southeast and still more easterly, settling in profusion upon the sheds. Simultane
ously with Keeling, Ira saw this danger, the wife and daughter saw it as well. All went hastening past the furnace. Before they reached the stable new tongues were showing on the dried shakes.
I got a couple buckets here, Mister, shouted Keeling. Help us fetch water from the creek!
Ira cried, I’ve a bad knee; but help me to get up there!
A cart stood near; Ira and the younger man pushed it with desperate strength against the stable. Ira managed to mount from cart to roof, with Keeling shoving at his legs. The man could not help much . . . Ira tore his own clothing . . . in another moment he had scrambled among the jeering flames. He yelled for a broom which he had seen lying in the yard; Keeling passed it to him while the young girl came laboring from the creek, spilling water from two wooden pails. Ira beat savagely with the broom, other naughty embers were flurrying down. Between water and poundings, the flames soon went out.
Best that your womenfolks splash water on those shed roofs too, Ira gasped. . . . So the danger passed as the main body of blaze went lower. They moved like actors on an orange-lighted stage. The area of illumination included the road, where now several horsemen could be seen halted, watching the affair. The stable was saved. . . . Ira had more difficulty getting down than he’d had ascending, until Keeling got his wits about him and fetched a homemade ladder from among his fruit trees. Ira walked across the dooryard toward the road, to find that the watchers were a youngish Federal major accompanied by three soldiers.
It’s too bad, said the major.
You should know. Bitterly. Your people did this.
Your house? asked the major.
Ira smelled burning of wool, he found where his coat sleeve was charring, he slapped at this tiny destruction. Not my house. It belongs—or did belong—to the man approaching there—a former soldier, wounded into the bargain.
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